They Came With The Storm (The Effacing)

by Clark, T. Anwar

“Yeah, too bad for Jerry, though.” Mike said.

  “I thought he was with you?” I said.

  “It doesn’t look that way.” George said. “He was a good dude, man.”

  “And he’ll be remembered as one.” Mike confirmed, and then gazed upon his latest kill.

  I knew what I was looking at but didn’t. The Tracker died wearing a torn and bloody, open hospital gown. It was completely hairy. Its eyes were black as coal, and still open. The nose traveled like a snout, but not that much different from ours; and the teeth were sharp and bloody. It was extremely hairy to the point you couldn’t recognize the human gender, it looked to be close to ten feet in height, and had to weigh at least half a ton. The hands and feet were stretched and swollen into paw-like claws, but what Mike might have been attracted to was the Tracker's hair color. It was Burgundy. Not too far off from Major's coat. It was a more matured and evolved Tracker that resembled the legendary Werewolf.

  George was relieved that Mike and I came to his rescue before he was the main course on a Bleeders buffet dinner plate. And if I didn't know any better, I owed George for saving my life once I noticed the autopsy table was empty.

  “You saved my life first.” I told George. “If I’d a stayed by that table, I would of had it.”

  "Major?" Mike said, walking closer to the Tracker.

  “That’s not major.” I looked back down to the large and evolved Tracker, and realized that we had to of been set up.

  Was it too late to escape?

  Mike stared at the Tracker, and George tagged along behind me to the janitors closet. When I tried turning the knob to the door, a red light flashed overhead and I looked to Mike for a solution.

  "Major?" Mike said once more to the downed Tracker, still under the illusion that the beast he looked upon was his adoring child and pet; or had a striking resemblance that only Mike would be able to tell.

  "Mike, that ain't major. Snap out of it and help us get through this door..." I pleaded.

  He snapped out of it.

  "You ready for that ride, George?" Mike asked, looking into the Trackers eyes. Then he breathed, "Major," one more time before standing up straight.

  "I'm ready." George finally answered.

  Then I tried to explain to Mike, "This is a setup... it's gotta be. Think about it... we waltz right up in here and start getting attacked—"

  He answered, "Maybe. But how is that when the corpse was cold. Dead cold. It would have never sprung to life if curious George didn't open the box. And that Tracker’s something else; something we haven't seen before. If this is a trap, where are the soldiers?" then walked over to the double swinging exit door and stuck his head out.

  George lay on the thin mattress and covered up to his neck. Mike brought his head back into the room and slid his rifle under the sheet with George; I slid my rifle in from the other side.

  "You can't see something's wrong here, Mike?" I questioned his sanity and competence.

  "What other choice do we have, Dale?" He responded. "If it’s a set up… so what… at least we tried. You know, you really need to man up and stop acting like a bitch sometimes. Take some responsibility for something, for once in your life."

  "Responsibility! What are you really trying to say, Mike? No. Better yet, what’s up with what happened to Sarah? You never said anything about it and I keep asking."

  “See… responsibility. That’s you again. You can’t take credit for that night either. I guess your excuse was you were high or drunk. And all you had to do was go out with her to look for Major. She was bit that night, Dale. But no, I was talking about something else.”

  I didn’t remember a damn thing; and I woke up that morning with a hangover. What Mike had said made me feel like the bad guy. But I refused to let myself feel to blame about what happened to her. Would you trust a drunken man to finish a task or to run an errand?

  I said, “What was my responsibility, Mike?”

  We were arguing from both sides of the sick bed; George was in the middle. He was quiet, and patiently waiting to hear (or see) where (and how far) Mike and I would take the hidden and emotionally charged argument.

  Mike was hotter than a formula 1 race car that just completed the Indy 500 and on fire, and more upset than a Pitbull that just lost a fight and having to answer to its estranged owner. He got in my face, attempting his damnedest not to raise his voice, and said, "Responsibility, Dale! Exactly, what were you doing that night it all happened?"

  I couldn't believe what he said, and retorted, "Is that what this is about? You think it was my fault what happened. You think I would just leave the back door open purposely, for those mentally fucked up bitches to walk right in the house and do what they did? Mom and Dad, are you serious?” I exclaimed, fighting back tears.

  "Did you leave the door unlocked or what, D? Answer that, an' I won't bring it up; ever."

  I could tell he wasn't letting up. I stared him coldly in the eye, took a deep breath and said, "You want to get something off your chest, Mike?"

  Mike was right. I did know what happened that night. The back door may have been left unlocked, but it wasn’t the reason why our family was targeted.

  George interrupted, "Come on guys... think about what you're doing, you're brothers. Fighting each other is only just gonna hinder us from what we gotta do. You the only ones you got right now."

  George was right and exact.

  Mike and I broke eye contact.

  "Just forget it, Dale." Mike finished.

  I felt totally castrated. I couldn't think nor say anything. It felt like I didn't deserve to live.

  Mike took a deep breath, then looked up toward the ceiling, lowered his head, put his hands across the bed, and said, "Alright let's do it. The elevator is at the end of the hall. We'll ride it to the first floor into the emergency room." he looked down at George, "You're gonna to have to cover up completely."

  We were on the elevator before the next team could arrive in the morgue. As the doors were shutting, the swaying doors of the morgue cracked open. A shadow came from the other side; and then a clawed paw.

  "Holy shit!" Mike called out.

  I immediately thought that we were dead. My second thought was about what the next team had to face when they entered the morgue. My third thought was that they'd see the animal from the washroom and figure a strategy to kill it.

  Then, the massive-sized Tracker charged us. The elevator door shut, then shook like a 5.0 earthquake, forcing us to grab hold of the walls for balance when the Tracker, obviously, rammed it. It howled as the elevator climbed, and the thundering sound of the beast pounding away on the outer doors followed.

  CHAPTER XVI

  "Believe me now?" I asked Mike as the banging noise discontinued.

  Mike shut his eyes and moved his lips but wasn't saying anything. He was either rambling obscenities or praying to get out the hospital alive.

  "I'm getting a little choked up guys. Let's pray we don't run into anymore of those beasts when the door opens," George suggested from under the sheet.

  "I just did." Mike stated.

  "I hope the next team realizes what they’re dealing with before they come out the sewers." I mentioned.

  DING!

  We were there.

  "Pray." George added.

  Mike didn’t say anything.

  There was no telling what else might have patiently lurked through the corridors of the cold and modest building structure. The lights inside the elevator rapidly flickered, the elevator door opened, and we brazenly stepped off, staring down the informational map with pointing arrows, below it, the word 'EMERGENCY' standing out in the center with an arrow pointing to the left.

  I looked to the right side as I stepped off the elevator; at the end of the hallway it was pitch black.

  We made the left.

  The wheels of the hospital bed squeaked as we breezed through the well-lit, vacant corridor, checking inside every room we came upon in pursuit of survivors; they we
re all empty. At the end of the hall was a thick plastic film that separated the emergency waiting room from the corridor, and by the time we blew through the plastic curtain, a quick look at the thick plastic sheets over the windows made me feel an even greater form of discomfort that I wasn’t showing. Then, the sound of steel slamming down on the ceramic hospital tiles behind us immediately informed me that the jig was up.

  I jolted straight up, like I was being surged with power by a lightning bolt (Only it was fear and adrenaline.) before turning back to see ten die hard soldiers. They were planted behind a wall of steel shields that were set up like a concrete medium you'd see on the interstate. They aimed their automatic M-16s and close quarter sub-machine guns with infer-red beams in our direction; and then, rushing through the waiting room doors In front of us, ten more troops formed a solid steel barricade. We had no choice but to raise our hands and peacefully surrender, or face an excruciating demise, becoming the victims of an impedingly serious orthodox firing squad.

  "Believe me now?" I spoke in a whisper to my older brother.

  The soldiers didn’t move.

  "George...” Mike said slowly. “You can get up now."

  George raised his head from under the sheet, and at his first recognition of the soldiers his hands went up as well; his lower body and our firearms still concealed underneath the sheet.

  "Good work little brother." Mike finally answered me, still cocky and arrogant with a hint of sarcasm and anger in his voice.

  The raspy voice of Steven Sworn came from behind the ten soldiers in a defensive formation perched in front of us. The Master Sergeant said, "I know you didn't think it was going to be that artless, did you?"

  We didn’t say anything.

  I was under the assumption that Sworn wasn't really looking for an answer.

  Sworn continued, "You thought you could out smart us and leak the infection outside of our quarantine zone, huh?"

  Mike, hands raised, said, "There is no infection and you know it. Where's everyone you said would be here."

  Sworn responded, "Do you want the truth?"

  "Oh, come on, don't feed us that bullshit."

  "I would rather hear you say what the truth is." Sworn ejected.

  Sworn’s soldiers gave out a hearty laugh as if it were all a game.

  Mike put his hands down. George and I followed the same.

  Mike said, "There was a vaccine and healthcare center here? The only thing I seen was an abnormal sized lab experiment that resembled a wild animal, only super fucking huge with the strength of a Rhino."

  I was thinking that if the smaller, muscular Trackers could scale bricks and break down thin layers of walls, then in a few seconds, that monstrosity of a sick and volatile brain-dead nemesis we left in the morgue was already on to our scent. And soon, Sworn would get the wakeup call of a lifetime.

  "What we're doing here is everything that you might expect," Sworn added, "only not precisely as you mentioned."

  "What?" Mike asked.

  "We had an eye on you from the start, boy," Sworn laughed as he walked through the man-made barrier towards us. "And you both did quite well running. I didn't expect you to make it past the second day, but you did..." then he finally emerged from behind his soldiers.

  Sworn wasn't a man of compassion, only power and obstruction through force and malignity. He wore black fatigues under heavily protective bullet proof body armor. Up close he was 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighed in at about 250 pounds, his over excessive facial hair was rough and ragged. His face was stern and cold and he held the convicted eyes of a hardened criminal's life on the run from the ordinance.

  I didn't want to shut out Sworn's admission and testimonial truth, but I vaguely interpreted a rumbling, pounding sound coming from back in the corridor. I shifted around, only moving my head to look, and seen the soldiers posted up exactly like the ones in front of me. A few of them turned to see what the noise was.

  With an up-tempo hand gesture toward the corridor, Sworn nodded his head upward and four of his soldiers evacuated their positions into the darkness of the corridor behind them.

  I looked to Mike.

  Mike looked back to me and disclosed, "Get ready for it," under his breath.

  George, sitting up on the hospital bed trying to keep the guns covered, looked to us in accord.

  "It seems that things have gotten out of hand extremely fast. But we now have it in order." Sworn advised us. "Did you know that when the dead walk with infection, they become human parasites looking for a host to spread its parasitic DNA... multiplying its potency with a new host, dying to live out its strain for an eternity? Like the female Cannabis Sativa, producing seeds that will eventually find their home, gardened next to another, intertwining in their youth with one another to become an even more powerful and more enhanced hybrid strain? You do like weed… don’t you?"

  "The fuck does that mean?" Mike grunted.

  Sworn let out another deep toned gargle of a laugh, "It means that all you would have to do is compel the parasite to know and fully understand that you yourself are the very creator of its physical development, and that you hold the fundamentals of its life and death. It means that you must become the nurturer of this divinely, great and magnificent creature. You must become what the parasite fears most... and understanding that... what it fears most is death... hypnotically put them under your control and they’ll assume they’re living out their normal day lives. That!!! is what the dead dream. They’ll never know their reality, their mission to devour the fresh blood underneath the living flesh of their fellow man, woman and child. And you will ultimately become their master; their mother, father, and their god!"

  "And what's this about, again?" Mike questioned Sworn.

  “You're going to die soon, anyway. This is about an indestructible army of genetically developed, mutated and totally expendable warriors that can consistently rise from their demise in battle...” he raised a clenched fist. “They are hunters as well as seekers; or trackers. And so much more has yet to come. We call them Runners. I'll let the name speak for itself."

  Runners… I thought we were the runners. But I guess we were wrong about that. Maybe listening to Sworn wasn't such a bad idea.

  He continued. "If you're bit, you soon fall ill, and in a matter of minutes, days or weeks, almost instantly turn, or die, and evolve into unstoppable freight train. We prefer them alive and with their full senses. However, some of my business associates have been developing a nice remedy, with just a few more test trials somewhere else, far away. There were plenty of mistakes made throughout these past few days, but we’re, how should I say, fixing the glitches. The Bleeders are failed attempts at greatness, drying up and becoming food for the Trackers. These are warriors with no regard for the lives of the enemy, which feeds off of the living flesh, meat and bones for survival; warriors that recreate without physical penetration like us, but through their venomous bite or their blood-filled saliva once it’s into the blood stream. Living in darkness, they will age to become incredible scouts in future missions, and under the right leadership they'll be used as the perfect front line of defense…” he paused and rubbed his chin. Then said, “Hell, I ain't creating the damn things; I'm just a high paying collector with a purpose. I needed a place to test out my new investment and your city officials approved. Whatever happens here goes down in the books as a major disaster by good ol' Mother Nature. And trust me... no one will ever know we were here."

  “So,” Mike said, “this is about you?” Then spat toward the tiles and in Sworn’s direction, disgusted.

  A menacing inward roar, then snarl that gradually developed into a howl came from behind us.

  Sworn stepped back, vanishing behind his men.

  The soldiers moved back about five feet in unison.

  Mike, George and I turned to look behind us, next thing I remember was how fast George was on his feet; and our weapons hitting the floor.

  The monstrosity hunched over, but stood
motionless behind the plastic curtain, Sworn's massacred company less than 20 feet away from us; the other six men with shields and guns, their backs against the wall.

  “Ain’t this a bitch?” I said.

  “We’re standing in the middle of an arena.” Mike said.

  The three of us took a few beast measuring steps back. George tripped over the guns and hit the tile with a thump. Mike stood as if he was waiting for the creature to appear from the other side of the curtain, and I had every thought in my mind to kill the Runner dead this time; as I scanned for a way out of our crippling situation without Sworn's men – or their pet – killing us in the process.

  I was prepared to kill Sworn.

  “Get to your feet George.” Mike said, as he helped him up.

  The waiting room windows were all covered in thick plastic from the outside, making it impossible to see what was happening in the parking area; I wanted to know if we actually stood a chance of another group barging in to save our asses. To my front left was a closed door leading into the restrooms. There were two openings a few feet further with plastic curtains hiding the view; the fire alarm, the usual lame paintings, and an unfinished paint job. I could see blotches of paint descending the small pipes that ran through the unfinished ceilings at the corner of the walls. There were four rows of 6 waiting chairs on each side of us, a couple of trash cans near the reception desk, and a hole in the wall about the size of a basketball; inside, insulation and wood, and a crumbled fast food combo meal bag and drink.

  “Is it like the others?” I looked to Mike.

  “I don’t know.” Mike said. “It ain’t doing anything.”

  Why wasn't the creature attacking Sworn's men? Instead, when it came through the curtain, breathing smoke out the nose hard and presenting itself as if waiting for orders to attack, it looked to Mike, George and I like we were the only ones in the room.

  Sworn and his entourage gave us the entire emergency waiting room to take on his dead, and dead again collector's item. What was it that was so different between us and Sworn's men? What did Sworn mean in his babbling garble of illogical military exploits concerning the dead monster emergency task force he was collecting? He was insane. Who and where were his scientist and shrink?